by Nicholas Sammond

About Nicholas Sammond

Nicholas Sammond is Director of the Centre of the Study of the United States and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation and Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960. Both books received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Comix

book Keywords for Comics Studies

Writing about underground comix in the comics and animation journal Funnyworld in 1971, underground comix creator and publisher Denis Kitchen proclaimed that “by ridiculing the outmoded social system we live in, we are quickening its demise. And in its place, hopefully, will be established a society in which no ‘underground’ is necessary” (quoted in Schelly 2015, 484). The optimism in that statement is admirable, if not—given today’s social, political, and cultural struggles—enviable.